It has been shown that when pigs consume diets high in sucrose, granulomatous lesions develop in the left atrium and a hemorrhagic condition occurs. Even though these conditions occur independently of each other relative to time and severity, preliminary studies indicate that vitamin K supplementation prevents both. The objectives of this proposal are: 1. To determine how sucrose causes a vitamin K deficiency and the minimum level necessary in the diet to do so. In order to accomplish this, a reliable vitamin K assay technique will be developed. Following this, the effect of graded levels of sucrose on heart lesions, prothrombin time, qualitative and quantitative intestinal microflora, vitamin K production and absorption rate, food digestion rate, passage rate and blood sugar level will be studied. 2. To determine how vitamin K deficiency causes cardiac lesions and to what extent these lesions will develop in life cycle feeding of diets high in sucrose. This will require life cycle feeding trials in which samples of pigs are slaughtered at intervals to study different developmental stages of cardiac lesions and arterial changes and to correlate these changes to blood metabolites, blood sugar and tissue enzyme levels.